Pan Am Flight 73

Pan Am Flight 73 was a Pan American Airways Boeing-747 that was hijacked on 5 September 1986 by four Abu Nidal Organization terrorists on ground at Karachi, Pakistan. The flight, which took off from Sahar International Airport in Mumbai, India and landed at Jinnah International Airport in Pakistan for a stopover on a flight to Frankfurt Airport in West Germany, had 360 passengers and 19 crew members on board. The militants - who were dressed in Karachi security guard outfits - planned to use the plane to pick up Palestinian prisoners in Cyprus and Israel, and they stormed the plane and took it over. The pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer escaped through a hatch, effectively grounding the plane. Hijacker Zayd Hassan Abd al-Latif Masud al-Safarini decided to negotiate with the Pakistani authorities, and he ordered for his terrorists to kill hostages one-by-one as the authorities delayed the negotiation process. When night fell, the attackers intended to shoot one of the hijackers' explosive belts to cause a massive explosion and kill both themselves and the hostages, but they missed, and their grenades did not explode; they proceeded to open fire on the passengers, killing 20 with both their bullets and the shrapnel from them. The 17-hour-long hijacking came to an end when Pakistani commandoes, including the Pakistan Rangers, were put on high alert, and the hijackers began to shoot at the hostages, firing on them until they ran out of ammunition. The soldiers stormed the plane and seized the hijackers, putting an end to the attack. In all, 43 people were killed and 120 were wounded. Jamal Saeed Abu Rahim, Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain ar-Rahayyal, Muhammad Ahmed al-Munaway, Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz al-Turki, and al-Safarini were all sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted, and four of the prisoners escaped prison in 2008, while al-Safarini was turned over to the United States. Libya was accused of supporting the attackers.